Paper Crane Returns to Nest

When he was seven years old, the thin Shen Boan was pushed into the sandpit by an older child. Lin Zhi, who was in poor health, ran over to him, knelt in front of him and wiped his wound awkwardly, mumbling incoherently, "It doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt." He bit his lip and said "I don't feel any pain", but his lips were trembling. When Shen Boan's family moved away when he was ten years old, Lin Zhi squatted in front of his house all afternoon, waiting until dark. In the next seven years, from frequent correspondence to one postcard a year, the last letter contained only one sentence: "The winter here is very cold, but the snow is beautiful." Lin Zhi did not reply. A few provinces away, she didn't know how to respond to his words. Lin Zhi was seventeen years old when we met again, during the summer vacation when he was promoted from junior high school to vocational high school. Shen Boan was eighteen years old and was hospitalized due to severe emotional disorder and slit his wrists. She pushed open the ward door and saw him sitting on the hospital bed with his head lowered, gauze wrapped from his wrist bone to his forearm. She gently held his injured hand, tears fell on the gauze, and said, "It hurts a lot." He slowly raised his head, with cracks in his dead eyes, and called her name in a hoarse voice: "Lin Zhi... It doesn't hurt." From then on, she came every day, bringing no condolences, only novelty gadgets, and chattering about her own affairs. At first he didn't speak, but later he would nod and say "hmm", and later he would point out that she was wearing the wrong color of makeup, and would say "wait until you turn eighteen" when she was scolding him for owing a week's homework. She studied makeup and he took the design exam. They stayed with each other across the screen for seven years apart - she showed him the prize from the competition, he rushed to design drafts, she cooked porridge and checked the work, she took orders independently and received an entire color card book he drew by himself, he won the gold medal and she sat in the third row under the stage and cried with makeup. They had a quarrel, and three days after the cold war, he sent a photo of a pothos on the window sill climbing all over the wall, with the following sentence: "I can only talk to it when you are not here." In the winter of his twenty-sixth year, Shen Po'an quit his job in Hangzhou and appeared at the Nanjing high-speed railway station holding the pot of pothos he had grown for many years. The next day he put a silver ring in her palm with a paper crane engraved on the inside and said, "I owe you my homework for almost twenty years. Now I want to pay it back. Do you want to take it or not?" She accepted it. Later, they got married and raised a civet cat named "Zhihe". The balcony was covered with pothos on the railing, and the cat had a pile of paper cranes folded by Ji Huai under the pothos. One day during the spring equinox, Ji Huai sat at her feet and repotted the pothos, while the origami crane lay on his lap and snored. New buds appeared on the sycamore outside the window, and the vines were swaying in the wind. Sunlight spread all over the floor, exactly like in the ward many years ago. Only this time, there were no injuries. ——A story about reunion, healing and slowly coming home. Seven years of blank time, twenty years of staying together, once the paper crane is folded, it will always fly back by itself. Purpose: A story about healing and redemption